By the time he had covered the eight hundred miles to upper Missouri, much of his old buoyancy had returned. And his reception in Far West banished all traces of his gloom. The whole town turned out to meet him, singing and cheering. His oldest converts, who had been in Missouri since 1831, looked upon his flight from Kirtland as an answer to prayer. The bank failure, they said, was simply God’s device for bringing the prophet to Zion to stay. It had been a net “to cull the Saints out from that region to the blessed and consecrated land.”
